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Summary Merkur 7/2011
The leitmotiv of the July issue (Number 746) is narration: how does one relate modern history?, Karl Schlögel asks. How does one today relate German-Jewish stories?, Jakob Hessing wants to know. Michael Rutschky's journal from the year 1991 tells a very German story.
The issue opens with an essay that reconsiders the city as organism: Georg Franck's plea for urban commons, for sustainable urban planning. Apropos are also Gerwin Zohlen's polemic against ubiquitous show-off architecture and John Buntin's review of new books on urban planning.
Also: columns on major historical transformations and the ecology of political civic participation, a critical review of a monumental Nietzsche study, and finally a learned reverie on the power of imagination and an amusing essay on the necessity of collecting and the kookiness of the collector.
Georg Franck
The urban commons
On the sustainable city's challenge to urban planning culture
The characteristic urban manifestation of our era is the "Zwischenstadt", an in-between form that is neither country nor city but rather single structures scattered throughout the landscape. Some fifty years ago, this phenomenon was held responsible for the "inhospitality of our cities"; the "Zwischenstadt", however, has continued to grow with unstoppable force. This settlement structure is definitely not sustainable; the agglomeration is held together by an excessive emergence of individual motorized vehicles. The next plan is to rescale cities to again become "walkable".
All of the ideas for a sustainable urban structure point to the compact city, but wouldn't it also do the trick to fill in here and there with new buildings? A punctiform fill in would pre-program the next urban catastrophe. What we thus must now do is fundamentally reconsider the organism that is the body of the city.
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